``The idea of suspending the markets for the time it takes to rewrite the rules is being discussed,'' Berlusconi said today after a Cabinet meeting in Naples, Italy. A solution to the financial crisis ``can't just be for one country, or even just for Europe, but global.''

The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell as much 8.1 percent in early trading and pared most of those losses after Berlusconi's remarks. The Dow was down 0.5 percent to 8540.52 at 10:10 in New York.

At this point I feel it may be in its place to make a jump forward to discuss what is likely to occur after the two pulses of LIGHT in DAY 4 and DAY 5. In the Fifth NIGHT, (November 18 2007 – November 12, 2008, ruled by the energy of Tezcatlipoca, the god of darkness), we will see the last desperate attempts of the West, and power hierarchies based on materialism everywhere, to remain in control and strengthen their power in some new very oppressive way.

If the international monetary system collapses in DAY 5 we may for instance come to see this replaced by a centralized Electronic control over everyone’s economic interactions (Not to mention control of whereabouts and other things). Except that I simply look upon it as a phase in a cosmic plan, this is the time period when many of the scenarios described by conspiracy theoreticians may come true.

Beginning on October 1, the First Brigade Combat Team of the Third Division will be placed under the command of US Army North, the Army’s component of the Pentagon’s Northern Command (NorthCom), which was created in the wake of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks with the stated mission of defending the US “homeland” and aiding federal, state and local authorities.

The unit—known as the “Raiders”—is among the Army’s most “blooded.” It has spent nearly three out of the last five years deployed in Iraq, leading the assault on Baghdad in 2003 and carrying out house-to-house combat in the suppression of resistance in the city of Ramadi. It was the first brigade combat team to be sent to Iraq three times.

The solar wind "inflates a protective bubble, or heliosphere, around the solar system," which protects the inner planets against the radiation from other stars, said Dave McComas, Ulysses' solar wind principal investigator and senior executive director at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas.

"With the solar wind at an all-time low, there is an excellent chance the heliosphere will diminish in size and strength," said Ed Smith, NASA's Ulysses project scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

"If that occurs, more galactic cosmic rays will make it into the inner part of our solar system," added Smith.

Scientists say the weakening of solar wind appears to be due to changes in the sun's magnetic field, but the causes of these changes are unknown.

The 90 percent job approval rating, measured in a poll of 1,005 adults Friday and Saturday, outranks the previous record -- a rating of 89 percent garnered by Bush's father, former President George Bush, at the end of the 1991 Gulf War.

It compares to an approval rating of 86 percent scored by the younger Bush in a survey conducted last week...

Gallup said the poll, which it conducted for CNN and USA Today, showed the highest presidential approval rating in the six decades it has been posing the question to Americans.

President Harry Truman scored an approval rating of 87 percent after the Germans surrendered in WWII. Gallup began measuring presidential approval in 1938 during the administration of Franklin Roosevelt.

Franklin D. Roosevelt scored an 84 percent approval rating in January 1942... Bush breaks record

And with those words, the Treasury secretary - whoever that may be in a few months - would be vested with perhaps the most incredible powers ever bestowed on one person over the economic and financial life of the United States. It is the financial equivalent of the Patriot Act, after 9/11.

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson Jr.'s $700 billion proposal to bail out Wall Street is both the biggest rescue and the most amazing power grab in the history of the American economy.

In many ways, it is classic Wall Street: a big, bold roll of the dice that one trade can save the day. But at the same time, the hypocrisy is thick. The lack of transparency and oversight that got our financial system in trouble in the first place seems written directly into the proposed bill, known as TARP, or the Troubled Asset Relief Program. House price crash goes global

What is scary about the picture is that there is only one tiny sunspot.

Disconcerting as it may be to true believers in global warming, the average temperature on Earth has remained steady or slowly declined during the past decade, despite the continued increase in the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, and now the global temperature is falling precipitously.

All four agencies that track Earth's temperature (the Hadley Climate Research Unit in Britain, the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, the Christy group at the University of Alabama, and Remote Sensing Systems Inc in California) report that it cooled by about 0.7C in 2007. This is the fastest temperature change in the instrumental record and it puts us back where we were in 1930. If the temperature does not soon recover, we will have to conclude that global warming is over.

New Cycle 24 Sunspot and SSN wavelet analysis

Maybe there is some hope for SC24 ramping up this year yet. This appears to be the largest SC24 spot to date. Previous SC24 spots have faded quickly, we’ll see how long this one lasts. In other news, Jan Jansens reports that SC23-24 continues to behave much more like cycles in the late 19th and early 20th century.

Bolivia: Indigenous government defies US-backed fascists

This campaign of terror, centred on the four resource-rich eastern departments (Santa Cruz, Pando, Beni and Tarija) known as the media luna (half moon), was initiated following a national referendum in which Morales’s presidency was endorsed by 67.4% of the vote — greater than the almost 54% that voted for him in 2005 and with a higher voter turnout.

The violence was an attempt to impose by force what was lost at the ballot box.

Violently assaulting civilians, police officer and soldiers, occupying and burning public buildings, blowing up gas pipelines, and blockading roads were among the tactics of the pro-neoliberal forces of the opposition, which utlitised fascist shock troops of racist armed youth gangs, such as the Santa Cruz Youth Union (UJC).

If Wall Street gets away with this, it will represent an historic swindle of the American public--all sugar for the villains, lasting pain and damage for the victims. My advice to Washington politicians: Stop, take a deep breath and examine what you are being told to do by so-called "responsible opinion." If this deal succeeds, I predict it will become a transforming event in American politics--exposing the deep deformities in our democracy and launching a tidal wave of righteous anger and popular rebellion. As I have been saying for several months, this crisis has the potential to bring down one or both political parties, take your choice.

This is how Republican Vice Presidential nominee Sarah Palin described Barack Obama’s win over Hillary Clinton to political colleagues in a restaurant a few days after Obama locked up the Democratic Party presidential nomination.

According to Lucille, the waitress serving her table at the time and who asked that her last name not be used, Gov. Palin was eating lunch with five or six people when the subject of the Democrat’s primary battle came up. The governor, seemingly not caring that people at nearby tables would likely hear her, uttered the slur and then laughed loudly as her meal mates joined in appreciatively.

“It was kind of disgusting,” Lucille, who is part Aboriginal, said in a phone interview after admitting that she is frightened of being discovered telling folks in the “lower 48” about life near the North Pole.

The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) strongly condemns the killing of a mother in front of her children yesterday, during an Israeli incursion into New Abasan town, east of Khan Younes.

PCHR investigations indicate that at approximately 14:30pm on Wednesday, 7 May, Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) troops raided the house of Majdi Abd al-Raziq al-Daghma during an incursion into New Abasan.

The troops opened the outside metal door, then blew up the wooden interior door. The force of the blast killed 33-year-old Wafa Shaker al-Daghma instantly. The IOF troops then stormed into the house and covered her body with a rug, having ascertained that she was dead. The troops then detained her three children, who had all witnessed the killing of their mother...

Video: Afghans Civilians Killed by U.S

THE AMERICAN Dream is long gone.

The expectation of rising living standards for each generation of workers has given way to a low-wage economy in which young workers will struggle just to match their parents' income--and are increasingly likely to end up worse off.

Even before the current economic crisis took hold, workers were working harder for less and carrying big debts to compensate for falling income. Record numbers of workers endured long and fruitless searches for employment, while those who had jobs are plagued with insecurity over their employment, health care and retirement.

Going after “Islamic terrorists”, carrying out a Worldwide preemptive war to “protect the Homeland” are used to justify a military agenda.

“The Global War on Terrorism” (GWOT) is presented as a “Clash of Civilizations”, a war between competing values and religions, when in reality it is an outright war of conquest, guided by strategic and economic objectives.

The GWOT is the ideological backbone of the American Empire. It defines US military doctrine, including the preemptive use of nuclear weapons against the “state sponsors” of terrorism.

The preemptive “defensive war” doctrine and the “war on terrorism” against Al Qaeda constitute essential building blocks of America’s National Security Strategy as formulated in early 2002. The objective is to present “preemptive military action” –meaning war as an act of “self-defense” against two categories of enemies, “rogue States” and “Islamic terrorists”, both of which are said to possess weapons of mass destruction.

Extensive damage was caused by the impact to the fishing boat. The hull was badly damaged, and virtually the entire deck area, all the equipment on it, and the canopy above the deck were severely damaged. Unusually, all of the crew happened to be in the cabin or at the fore at the time. Had they been on deck they would have had little chance of survival.

Via a megaphone, the Israeli military aboard the gunboat then made the threat that: "When the internationals leave Gaza, you will all be made to pay." Human rights observers from the International Solidarity Movement and from the Free Gaza Movement have recently been accompanying Gazan Fishermen during their work. Photographs

A drone operated by US-led forces in Afghanistan allegedly fired six to seven guided missiles at the madrassa in north Waziristan. It then shot at the house of Commander Haqqani, who first surfaced as a guerilla during the war against Russia in Afghanistan.

North and South Waziristan tribal regions are considered strongholds of the Pakistani Taliban. Pakistan's tribal belt has witnessed a sharp increase in attacks by drones operated by the US-led coalition forces in Afghanistan over the past week. More than 40 people have died in these attacks.

I participated in a march led by mothers with children in strollers that was blockaded on several occasions by national guard troops in full paramilitary gear. I witnessed homeless people marching for the right to housing being dispersed by security police in riot gear wearing gas masks and carrying beating sticks that were in excess of two feet long. I witnessed journalists and legal observers rounded up by the police and detained prior to mass arrests of hundreds.

A government that cannot tolerate the dissent of its citizens is a terrible burden upon freedom and democracy. The right to dissent plays a healthy, vital role in the national dialogue. It is only through dissent that we can often see the ugly face of actions which the wealthy and powerful would prefer to remain hidden.

Her most recent “victory” came on August 26 when Alaska’s voters defeated Measure 2, an initiative that would have banned hunting wolves from airplanes for sport.

Palin organized a campaign against Measure 2, and funded it with $400,000 of state money. For most of us, the idea of zooming around in a private airplane over snowbound wilderness just for the chance to spot a terrified wild dog and blow it apart with a high-powered rifle is insane. But there’s a whole culture out there in love with the idea. Palin did her part by playing the tired old Alaskan pioneer card, saying that lower-48 naysayers who dared to object to the idea of divebombing wildlife didn’t “understand rural Alaska.”

In his new book “The War Within,” Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward details a telling White House meeting on Iran in spring 2007 (p. 334):

“I think we need to do something to get engaged with these guys,” Fallon said. Iraq shared a 900-mile border with Iran, and he needed guidance and a strategy for dealing with the Iranians.

“Well,” Bush said, “these are assholes.”

Fallon was stunned. Declaring them “assholes” was not a strategy.

BESS: This whole thing of controlling, you know, information, censorship, yeah. That's a part of the scene.

ROSS: Not long after taking office, Palin raised the issue at a city council meeting of how books might be banned according to news accounts and a local resident, a Democrat, who was there.

ANNE KILKENNY: Mayor Palin asked the librarian, what is your response if I ask you to remove some books from the collection of the Wasilla Public Library?

ROSS: The Wasilla librarian, Mary Ellen Edmonds, the then president of the Alaska Library Association, responded with only a short hesitation.

KILKENNY: The librarian took a deep breath and said, the books in the collection were purchased in accordance with national standards and professional guidelines, and I would absolutely not allow you to remove any books from the collection.

"A few weeks after the council meeting, the mayor fired the librarian, although she was reinstated after a community uproar," Ross reported. "The Wasilla librarian, Mary Ellen Edmonds, left two years later, and according to friends, because it was just too hard working for Sarah Palin."

But the government of Ecuador has decided, and Washington has apparently agreed, that one of the most important foreign outposts in the United States’ war on drugs will close. The 450 U.S. Air Force personnel and contractors stationed at a military base that shares the airport’s runway will be leaving next year.

This decision reflects both the prevailing political climate here — standing up to the United States tends to be widely popular — and a new economic reality. With major projects underway in Manta by the Venezuelan government and a Hong Kong company, the U.S. dollars don’t amount to much.

What the world has watched instead is a comprehensive and malicious assault upon the integrity of the international and domestic legal orders by a group of men and women who are thoroughly Machiavellian and Straussian in their perception of international relations and in their conduct of both foreign policy and domestic affairs. Even more seriously, in many instances specific components of the Bush administration’s foreign policies constitute ongoing criminal activity under well-recognized principles of both international law and U.S. domestic law, and in particular the Nuremberg Charter, the Nuremberg Judgment, and the Nuremberg Principles, as well as the Pentagon’s own U.S. Army Field Manual 27-10 on The Law of Land Warfare (1956), all of which apply to President Bush himself as Commander-in-Chief of United States Armed Forces under Article II, Section 2 of the United States Constitution.

"Attempts by law enforcement to squelch lawful political speech and stifle the press have no place in our democracy and are unacceptable," said Anthony D. Romero, Executive Director of the ACLU. "Political conventions should be a showcase for free expression, not a venue for bullying and intimidation."
The ACLU specifically called for an investigation into possible violations of the First and Fourth Amendments, including:

• the arrest of reporters trying to gather the news;
• the mass arrest of hundreds of peaceful protestors;
• the surveillance and subsequent raids on several activist groups and private homes; and
• the confiscation by law enforcement agents of constitutionally-protected private property.

The ACLU affiliate office in Minnesota has assembled legal counsel for many of the reporters and peaceful protestors arrested since Monday. The ACLU of Minnesota has also filed a lawsuit in federal court calling for the release of boxes of literature that were confiscated during Monday's raids.

In this study, both an older neuroleptic (Haldol or "haloperidol") and a newer atypical neuroleptic (Zyprexa or "olanzapine") caused significant shrinkage in the higher level parts of the brains in monkeys. Source: Neuropsychopharmacology 9 March 2005

The world's biggest and most expensive scientific experiment has been hit by a last minute legal challenge, amid claims that the research could bring about the end of the world.

NATO has been increasing its naval presence in the Black Sea during the recent several days. “The US Navy destroyer USS McFaul, which is currently docked in the Georgian port of Batumi, carries about 50 Tomahawk cruise missiles on board. They are outfitted with nuclear warheads and are meant to hit ground targets. The remaining NATO ships are currently concentrated in the northern part of the Black Sea,” a source in the military intelligence of the Russian Federation said.

New Orleans has been busy reinventing itself as a post-Katrina tourist Mecca. But scarce attention has been paid to an invisible wall cutting across the city. Way beyond the renewed glitz of the French Quarter and downtown casinos the true post-Katrina story is actually told by homeless people living in a tent city under a flyover, or by struggling families trying to rebuild their homes and their lives in the Lower Ninth Ward.

On May 11, Steve Kurtz phoned 911 to report his wife of 20 years was unresponsive. When paramedics came to his house, one of them noticed that Kurtz had laboratory equipment, which he used in his art exhibits. The paramedics reported this to police and the FBI sealed off his house. Authorities later said that Kurtz's wife had died of "heart failure," but he wasn't allowed to return to his home for two days while the FBI confiscated his equipment, and biological samples. They also carted off his books, personal papers and computer. The contradiction between the charges for possessing harmful substances and the county health commissioner assessing that no hazardous substances were found in the house leaves only the conclusion - that ideas, when misunderstood or disagreeable, are toxic.

Steve Kurtz is not someone who should be sitting across the interrogation table, submitting to random drug tests and regularly meeting with his parole officer. He is an artist and educator who masterfully subverts the aesthetic to serve his goals. Kurtz, an Associate Professor in the Department of Art at SUNY, Buffalo, is the founding member of the Critical Arts Ensemble (CAE), a group of artists “whose multi-media projects fuse the political pedagogy of Bertolt Brecht with the madcap performance of Mr. Wizard. Donning lab coats and armed with household supplies and high school lab equipment, they assume the persona of amateur scientist. Their aim is to demystify the shadowy world of bio-weapons, trans-genetic manufacturing and the corporate appropriation of visual culture as well as more broadly, the public sphere itself,” writes Gregory Sholette, former Chair of the Art Administration Department at SAIC. The CAE take their performances into museums, festivals and the streets. They are actively engaged in theorization of their practice and regularly publish manifestoes advocating “tactical media activism.” They are “specialists in revolt,” according to Gregg Bordowitz, Assistant Professor, Film Video and New Media.

DALLAS – More than 200,000 US public school students were punished by beatings during the 2006-2007 school year, Human Rights Watch and the American Civil Liberties Union said in a joint report released today. In the 13 states that corporally punished more than 1,000 students per year, African-American girls were twice as likely to be beaten as their white counterparts. A culture of beatings and torture dating back to slavery in pre civil war America.

Four boys killed while playing football

I still can not erase the images that stuck on my mind of the killed children of Dardouna family who were playing football in their house yard in Jabalia.

Like an addicted I was searching for the story details, as if the images with all its sorrow, grieve, and bloody color was not enough for me.

“I was playing with my cousins” said Yehya, “Suddenly we were targeted. Ahmed’s head was far away from his body. I did not feel my legs. I was screaming as well as the other kids. We were not kids anymore”